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LinkedIn Features That Can Impact The Growth of your Company Quickly

Tags: linkedin

In the last few years I’ve been using LinkedIn for meeting key people that helped me out in finding jobs, I’ve used it to bring traffic to my blog and to bring revenues to my online businesses. Now LinkedIn has become also a powerful tool to build your community and true fans. No matter how you look at it, investing some of your time to understand this platform has become a must. I invested the last two years of my professional life using LinkedIn on a daily basis. There are a few features you need to know about in order to make the most out of LinkedIn. I’ve listed them all. 

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LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI)

The LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) is a useful metric to look at to understand how the LinkedIn algorithm perceives you from time to time.

This metric will not only allow you to see how you’re doing in four areas of your profile but also how you rank respectively in your industry and your network.

You might want to align those two metrics (how you rank in your industry and network). In fact, the more you grow your profile compared to the industry, the more you want to make sure your network SSI is growing.

A strong network is also what makes your communication effort over LinkedIn more effective. In addition, you can track how the Social Selling Index is progressing over time:

This feature, of course, is the starting point. Indeed, if on the one hand understanding how the LinkedIn algorithm is perceiving you is critical. On the other hand, understanding how people in your network are perceiving you is even more important. How can you track that?There is another critical feature for that.

LinkedIn People Also Viewed Feature

The People Also Viewed Feature allows you to understand how people perceive you on LinkedIn based on three main things:

  • the keywords you have in your profile: in fact, people find you on LinkedIn thanks to the keywords you use within your profile
  • the things that you post and publish: on LinkedIn you can use the self-publishing platform to publish or re-purpose your content. You can also publish posts and video which are native. Those can reach thousands of people over LinkedIn
  • what you like and share: LinkedIn Feed Algorithm is quite powerful. In fact, everything you do becomes part of your activity graph. Thus when you like or share something on LinkedIn you’re literally putting the face on that. Thus make sure to be aware when you like or share something

That is why based mostly on those activities, that is how your network will perceive you. For instance, if look at Neil Patel profile, which is public, you will see a few interesting things:

As of now, when you look for Neil Patel and dive into the People Also Viewed feature you will mostly notice profiles of people that work in the SEO industry (like Rand Fishkin and Brian Dean) or other entrepreneurs profile (like Brian Chesky from Airbnb).

This makes sense as Neil Patel is one of the most knowledgeable entrepreneurs, focused on SEO. Thus, this means that Neil Patel is pretty good in communicating over LinkedIn. Besides, this also tells you that he has a strong brand (which he has built over the years).

Thus, you might want to make sure when people visit your profile, they also view profiles that are related to your industry or in any case to sectors tied to your bottom line.

LinkedIn Search Appearances

When you go to your LinkedIn page, click on your image to access your dashboard. On that dashboard, there are interesting information and data. Some data is pretty important to understand whether your business effort over LinkedIn is paying back. You need to look at search appearances:

When you click on those search appearances you will notice the breakdown of companies that have been looking at your profile each week:

You can also find out where the people that looked at your profile which industry they belong to:

In my specific case, this information is critical. Because when I communicate over LinkedIn I want to connect to people that have specific roles within the organizations. In most cases, as I handle a complex sale, the more I get closer to the spending decision center, the more I improve my chances to close a deal.

Thus, when I talk to founders, executive directors and website managers, that informs me whether my communication effort is working. Thus, try to have in mind who’s the ideal person within the organization you might want to talk to and mold your communication on that. What role does that person have? How senior the profile needs to be? Do you want to target small organizations or a more structured company?

There is also another part of the LinkedIn Search Appearances that is critical: the keywords through which people are finding you on LinkedIn. Thus, this leads us to the next point.

LinkedIn Keywords Optimization

Within the LinkedIn Search Appearances you can also look through the keywords that are allowing you to be found on LiknedIn:

For instance, of those keywords, I realized that just the last one was relevant to me. The others seemed to be out of place. What to do when you get found for the wrong keywords? Simple: you have to update your profile to reflect the keywords you want to be found.

Where to focus your effort?

  • reorganize your skills
  • include relevant keywords in your headline and summary
  • complete the information on your profile by keeping in mind who’s your target

LinkedIn Who’s Viewed Your Profile Feature

LinkedIn offers plenty of analytic data from your profile, that can help you adjust the target by time to time. This includes how your profile is getting viewed over time. To access this feature go on your LinkedIn homepage and click on “who’s viewed your profile”:

You will get access to the Linkedin analytical dashboard:

Although LinkedIn doesn’t show you all the profile viewers unless you have the premium version. This feature is useful to track whether you’re getting more visibility over time.

LinkedIn Views of Your Post

As posts on LinkedIn have become quite important LinkedIn also allows you to track how those posts are performing. You can access the analytics of your post from the LinkedIn homepage:

Posts that are well drafted and in target with your audience, you can reach easily a few thousand people on LinkedIn:

This allows you to monitor how many views, shares you’re getting; and from which companies, roles, and cities those views are coming from:

Monitoring which posts work best and which ones generate business conversations is critical to growing your influence over LinkedIn.

However, it’s important to strike a balance. For instance, posting inspirational phrases might get you tons of likes. Yet I wonder from the business perspective if that adds any value.

It’s easy to get likes, less to generate business conversations.

People You May Know Feature

Growing your network is critical to improving your reach. Thus the business conversations you can generate over LinkedIn. LinkedIn‘s algorithm can help you out in building your network more quickly and efficiently. In fact, from the homepage, if you click on “My network,” you will access a page, that shows you the pending invitations you might have.

It will also show the people you may know:

Use this feature wisely, don’t just add anyone. Keep in mind that from the selection you’re doing you’re also training the LinkedIn algorithm to work for you. So the better you’ll select the people you might want to have in your network the more the algorithm might give you better suggestions.

Withdraw LinkedIn Pending Invitations

When you click on “My network” on the home page you will access the page where you can see the pending invitation and the people you may know. From there, click on manage all:

It will open up a page where you can see all the invitations you’ve sent:

Why do you want to withdraw contacts request? If you added someone because it represented a good fit for a business conversation, if after a week or so you didn’t get accepted it makes sense to withdraw the invitation for a few reasons. Frist, the other person simply doesn’t see you as a good fit. Second, you might have used the wrong message, thus by withdrawing you can retry with a more personalized message. Third, that person might be not that active on LinkedIn so it makes sense to find other channels to talk to her/him.

LinkedIn Native Video

I’m not an expert on LinkedIn videos, not because they don’t work or because they’re not effective. Quite the opposite. If you master videos you can reach a large audience. However, this is not my strength.

Yet people like Allen Gannet reach thousands of people with each video published on LinkedIn:

I admire Allen’s work because he’s pretty effective at personal branding. This is clear by the engagements each of his videos has. But he is also able to grow his business. How do I know? I bought his book, The Creative Curve, thanks to his videos on LinkedIn.

The above video is an example of a forty seconds video getting viewed by over sixty thousand people. Of course, Allen Gannet didn’t reach those numbers overnight. Yet if you become comfortable with publishing short video interviews, tips and in any case find the format the suits you best you might be able to reach thousands of people with a little effort.

LinkedIn Self-Publishing

A few years back the LinkedIn self-publishing platform was the most powerful tool to get noticed over LinkedIn. However, as you can imagine that also lead people outside the feed. This makes the publishing platform less interesting for LinkedIn from the monetization standpoint. In fact, in the feed, LinkedIn learns many things about us. That data we give it allows the company to monetize in several ways.

For instance, by showing sponsored ads. Or prompting us to buy a subscription plan or an online course part of the LinkedIn learning platform. Thus, over time the publishing platform has been taken over by posts and videos that instead are featured on the LinkedIn feed. Therefore, more valuable for the company from the financial standpoint.

Having said that I still believe the self-publishing platform is a powerful syndication tool. In short, if you use a company blog as a way to generate leads. Then from time to time it makes sense to republish that content over LinkedIn. Just like I did below:

This article that was previously published on my blog got re-published on LinkedIn. Over a thousand people looked/read it. That means that over ten thousand people might have seen it in their feed. This is not bad for a republished article, that only took a few minutes to set up. In addition, since at the end of the article I included a link that says “originally published on my blog” which points toward the article on my blog, this also brings traffic back to your website.

You could alternatively also include a call to action, such as “subscribe to my newsletter.”

LinkedIn Advanced Search

When prospecting to find the key people that can help you grow your business LinkedIn advanced search is a great tool. You can filter people based on locations, a degree of connections (1st, 2nd, 3rd) and current companies they work for:

 Besides people, you can use the same advanced search to look for jobs, content, companies, groups, and schools.

LinkedIn Career Advice

This is a feature implemented in November 2017. As explained by the LinkedIn team:

That’s why we’re launching Career Advice, a new feature that helps connect members across the LinkedIn network with one another for lightweight mentorship opportunities. Whether you need advice on your career path, switching to a new industry or best practices for a project you’re working on, Career Advice can help you find and connect with the right person who can help.

You can get started from here:
Click on get started:


This post first appeared on FourWeekMBA, please read the originial post: here

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LinkedIn Features That Can Impact The Growth of your Company Quickly

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